Names for Light

by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

  Sittwe

  My mother, father, and elder sisters spent their last years in Burma, the years leading up to my birth, in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State. My parents were transferred there as part of what my father described as a well-intentioned, though ultimately failed, government initiative to send educated professionals to the most remote and underdeveloped regions of the country. The initiative was a failure because many people who were transferred simply did not go and those who went did not stay. My parents were among the few who accepted their assignment, and who stayed for the full three years of their term.

  When I asked my mother why they decided to go, she said, I can’t even remember now. Then, she repeated in English, I don’t know why we made that decision. Even after living in America for over a quarter of a century, my mother still pronounced certain words in a vaguely British way. The t’s in her don’t and that were crisp, precise. I always had the impression that my mother’s Bamar was sloping and rushed, while her English, learned from Anglican nuns, stood up very straight and proper. We didn’t want to be cowards, my mother said, switching back to Bamar. We didn’t want to be so selfish. Maybe we felt we had a debt to repay. A duty to our country. I don’t know, she said.

  When I was a child, before I knew where or what exactly Sittwe was, I knew that it was a place of exile. For as long as I could remember, my family had lived in places where we did not belong, where people asked us where we came from—but my mother and father never spoke of the places where we lived, where I grew up, as places of exile. Sittwe alone was exilic. It was like falling into an abyss, my mother always said. The word she used, meaning gorge, pit, or chasm, rhymed with the word meaning fear. Like falling into fear, I heard.

  My parents received their transfer orders in December of 1986, five months after my middle sister was born. At the time, my father was teaching at RC3, Regional College Three, a two-year college that had been established, as if miraculously, right before my father graduated from university with what he had thought would be a useless degree in English. My mother, who had graduated with a degree in education, was teaching at my parents’ alma mater, RASU, Rangoon Arts and Sciences, formerly named Rangoon University.

  It was an iconic university, the birthplace of every nationwide anti-colonial strike, and of numerous anti-government protests. Famously, when the UN secretary-general U Thant passed away and the government refused him a state burial, students from the university kidnapped U Thant’s body and erected a makeshift tomb for him on campus. I was told this story when I visited the university the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college when I returned to Burma. By then, it was renamed University of Yangon. The campus was beautiful and decrepit, every stone facade stained with what looked like rain, but was likely mold, the peeling paint of the walls a light hospital green, and the stairs crumbling. My mother showed me her old office and classrooms, but also the places on campus where student protestors had been shot and killed, by the police, by the military. None of these places were marked with plaques or statues. When I asked questions too loudly, my mother told me to keep my voice down.

  Sittwe is located on an estuarial island along the eastern coast of the Bay of Bengal. A kyun, my mother always said, drawing out the word. Kyun. Island. In English, the two-syllable word is paradisal; an island is a place of escape, of wonder, land appearing where land was not expected. In Bamar, the one-syllable kyun, with its elongated vowel, is dismal, claustrophobic; a kyun is a place trapped by water, a forsaken place, a place of banishment. By consonance it evokes the word for narrow, kyin, and the word for tight, kyat. Sittwe was a kyun, my mother always said, when I asked her what the city was like. An estuarial island, surrounded not only by the ocean, but by rivers as well, vulnerable to both cyclones and floods.

  My father was appointed the English department chair and my mother a tutor at Sittwe Degree College. The college had recently transitioned from being a two-year institution to a four-year institution and my father was sent to build up the English department. It was technically a promotion for him, since in Rangoon, at RC3, he had been a tutor like my mother. My parents fought over how I should represent their official titles. Say “lecturer,” my father said. You weren’t a lecturer yet at RC3, my mother said. If she says “tutor,” my father said, people here won’t know what she means.

  People here or people from here was a phrase my father used often. My father was always reminding my mother of the limitations of the people here, of the importance of translating for them, of making oneself intelligible to them. Growing up, I picked up from context that people here were largely ignorant, though not necessarily unkind. They were capable of acting fairly and even generously, but only if steered in the right direction. My father never asked anything of people here. If they could not understand or accept that a word could have different meanings in different places to different people, he simply changed the word. Say “lecturer,” my father said. People here don’t think of tutors as teachers and that’s what we were. The word for teacher in Bamar was saya for men and sayama for women, titles of respect. We were teachers, my father said firmly, saya sayama.

  Before the move to Sittwe, my mother had never really left home. She was born in Rangoon, and with the exception of some childhood years spent in Katha and Moulmein, she had never left the capital. Katha was in the north, in Sagaing, bordering Kachin State, and Moulmein was in Mon State, bordering Tanintharyi, the long, narrow region of the country that resembled the tail of a kite. My mother’s father was an income tax officer and had been transferred to both places in his time. On a map, Katha and Moulmein seemed as distant from Rangoon as Sittwe was, but in reality, they were much closer. At that time, Sittwe was accessible only by air or by sea. There was no land route yet through the Rakhine Yoma, the mountain range that isolated Rakhine State from the rest of the country.

  My mother knew little about Sittwe and about Rakhine State, but she had heard the name of the river that ran through the state and the city. Kispanadi, my mother said, savoring the four syllables. I thought it was so romantic, she said, such a beautiful name. My mother held on to that name like it was a promise.

  When the family arrived in Sittwe, however, they were greeted by the black waters of the Kispanadi River, and eternally gloomy skies. The apartment they had been promised was not yet available and they had to stay in a hotel until the previous tenants moved out. The hotel was expensive and my parents had to pay for it themselves. Even decades later, my mother was still angry about this. Why didn’t they say they weren’t ready for us? my mother asked. Why didn’t they say, “please don’t come yet”? Then, she answered her own questions. They were afraid we wouldn’t come, she said, they were afraid that if they delayed, we would change our minds.

  The long-awaited apartment was a two-bedroom in a government-owned building. The larger of the bedrooms was haunted, so the whole family slept together in the smaller one. The apartment had a kitchen, a living room, and a bathroom. Standard government housing, though luxurious by local standards. The building was full of lu gyi, my mother said, big people, high-ranking officials from various departments and ministries. Everyone thought it was a wonderful place to live, my mother said, but we were so unhappy. The electricity came on only between six in the evening and midnight. Running water was available only between five and six in the morning. My father said their apartment building received more water than others in the city because the engineer in charge of the city’s plumbing lived there. He made sure the water in the building ran for the full hour.

  I have never been to Sittwe, but all my life I believed I was conceived there. I imagined it had happened in the haunted room, since the children, my sisters, went to sleep early in the smaller bedroom, which the whole family shared.

  Later, I learned that my parents were back in Rangoon when I was conceived. My mother had returned in March of 1988 when the government closed colleges and universities in response to protests over the death of a student at
RIT, Rangoon Institute of Technology, who was shot and killed by riot police. My parents referred to the widespread protests as the Phone Maw ayekhin. Ko Phone Maw was the name of the student who was killed, and ayekhin meant demonstrations, marches. Most often I have seen it translated as uprising. It is a word whose power has no equivalent for me in English. A word that has the word ye, write, inside of it. An ayekhin was an effort to write history, with one’s body, with one’s life.

  My parents knew the larger bedroom in Sittwe was haunted because the first night they tried to sleep there, my mother, my father, my two-year-old eldest sister, and my five-month-old middle sister, no one could get any rest. The children were pulled awake by invisible hands. A ghostly figure was sighted in their mosquito net. We were haunted the whole night, my mother said, we couldn’t sleep at all.

  A condition of ghostliness is restlessness, which is why people who stay out too late are called street ghosts or street haunters. Later, my mother learned that someone had died in the room. In their apartment building, many people died, from sickness, old age, or natural disasters. A neighbor, an older unmarried woman who befriended my mother, said the tenants in their building died in fours, dropping off one after the other until every seat at a dining table was filled. In death, just as in life, people did not like to eat alone. Ghosts, too, longed for company. Hearing the story about the haunted bedroom, I wondered if I was the ghost who haunted my family, if I was the presence that had kept them awake with my demand to be felt and seen, to be a part of the family.

  II

  Leymyethna

  My great-grandfather was reborn in a woman’s body, in my body, my mother said, because he had been a vain, arrogant, and comfort-seeking man. He died of a blood vessel that ruptured in his brain. In Bamar, to have a stroke is to have wind cut off. Cut, severed, or crossed over, as when my great-grandfather crossed over to death, or when my family crossed over to Thailand and then the United States, and never returned. Strokes are caused by high blood pressure and high blood pressure is caused, in part, by stress. In moments of stress, people cut themselves off, or are cut off, from a family, a culture, a nation, even from a life.

  My great-grandfather felt dizzy and asked for the doctor. Then he sat down in his chair and died. He died right away, my grandmother told my mother, he did not suffer much. My great-uncle, the eldest son, never called the doctor, or he delayed, or he called the doctor only after his father had died. This great-uncle was the one who was later sent to Rangoon for an education, the one for whom royal jewels were sold. He was sent away even before he had graduated from secondary school. Despite all my great-grandmother’s efforts, he did not graduate.

  Many years after the end of the war, and the end of my great-grandfather’s life, I went to the Colorado School of Traditional Chinese Medicine and asked the students there to tell me what was wrong with me. The first time I asked, they said they would consult their supervisor. The second time I asked, at the end of my appointment when I was already checking out at the front desk, the student behind the desk told me my diagnosis: blood deficiency with internal wind. What does that mean? I asked, and the student seemed reluctant to explain. It has to do with your blood circulation, she said, and wind can be related to strokes, paralysis, seizures, anything like that.

  I did not tell the student that I was reincarnated from my great-grandfather or that he had died of a hemorrhagic stroke, because even at a traditional Chinese medicine clinic, I suspected that this information would seem irrelevant. I thanked the student and made an appointment to see her again the next week.

  The war came to an end soon after my great-grandfather’s death. Bombs stopped falling on cities and the family was able to come out of hiding and return home. Home was a house in the city of Hinthada, a port city by the Irrawaddy River, where my great-grandfather and great-grandmother had settled after their marriage. I do not know why my great-grandmother did not stay in the village of Leymyethna, her ancestral home. I do not know why she chose to leave her parents’ house, for the first time as a bride, and the second time as a widow. I do not know why but I know that she did: she returned to Hinthada with her seven children and a trunk full of jewels. She would not leave the city again. Forty years after my great-grandfather’s death, my great-grandmother would die in the city, in Hinthada, in the house that had withstood the British bombs and Japanese bombs.

  And it was a miracle their house had withstood the bombs and the looters. Many of their neighbors’ homes had been destroyed. Some of their neighbors never returned. Every night, my great-grandmother walked through the house casting prayers of protection so the family would not be robbed, so the jewels her late husband had inherited would be safe in the attic where she hid them.

  When my great-grandfather was still alive, he kept the family jewels locked in a chest, a chest he would habitually open with a key, so he could gaze upon his mother’s treasure. Even then, long before the jewels were sold, one by one, they were already relics of a lost time, of a slaughtered and exiled monarchy. My great-grandfather’s mother was a princess, a niece of the last true king. The very last king of Burma was not a true king, my mother always said. He came into power only because his mother-in-law had all of his brothers and sisters put to death, all the princes and princesses with a claim to the throne. It was bad luck to spill royal blood upon the earth, so the princesses were strangled, and the princes were thrown into sacks and beaten to death. In other stories, they were rolled into carpets and trampled by elephants. My great-grandfather’s mother only escaped because she was not a daughter of the king. She was a daughter of the king’s elder brother. She escaped from the palace with her life and the jewels she was wearing on her body.

  I find a detailed fact sheet on my diagnosis of blood deficiency: Some Causes, Potential Signs, What to Do.

  Causes: eating poorly, thinking too much

  Signs: dry skin, hair loss, numbness, dizziness, poor memory, difficulty focusing, depression, anxiety, stress, difficulty falling asleep, a feeling of disembodiment, lack of strength, headaches and migraines To Do: everything I have already tried

  I wondered if my great-grandfather exhibited the same potential signs before he died. If he too had tried meditation, yoga, chi kung, cooking, reading, and walking. I wondered if he too had had seizures. The tingling in his hands and feet, the hazy feeling, like a curtain drawn over the whole world, and then the tightening, the loss of control, his body wrung out and warped. Did he feel the shame of being conscious through it all? Through the interminable seconds that it lasted? Did he try to hide the seizures the way I did, for years and from everyone around him? Did he live in fear of his own body, of not knowing when or how it would betray him, of not knowing why?

  When I was younger, my mother and father feared I would grow up to be too much like my great-grandfather. I was their youngest and most American child, and they feared that the vices of the aristocracy would resurface in my relatively privileged person: laziness, indulgence, arrogance. Don’t be such a smart-ass, my father said to me one morning when we were stopped in traffic. I cannot remember what I had been saying. It was the only time my father ever swore at me.

  My mother said my pride was too quick to swell, and I had to learn to suppress it. She wanted me to be gentle and sweet. Hearing those words, I wanted nothing more than to break them with my hands. I wanted nothing more than to kill. I believed, at times, that I was capable of murder. Not the murder of a living being, for that was against the first precept, but the murder of a living idea, a concept: gentleness, sweetness, femininity. I did not understand why my parents were so intent on reforming me when I had already been born into a woman’s body. I did not know what I had left to lose in the next life.

  My great-grandfather was a beautiful man, my mother said my grandmother told her. He had fine, intelligent eyes, dark eyebrows, and a noble bearing. He also had lavish tastes. He enjoyed rich foods, silken fabrics, leather-bound books. I do not know if he had a library, but I imagine
if he did, it would be filled with only heavy, dark volumes. My great-grandfather was an educated man. He went to a university in Sri Lanka, back when it was called Ceylon. He studied agriculture. He was a gentleman-farmer, a landowner who lived in a city, in Hinthada, a city large enough to be bombed during the war. My great-grandfather spoke English when he studied in Ceylon. His tongue formed the same words I form now, his hands as he held the fountain pen, his eyes as they moved across a page. I wonder if he resisted the language in the privacy of his mind, in the realm of his dreams. I wonder if he knew he would succumb to it one day, in a future life, in a body no longer his own.